


Tell Me Ma

by Shayvaalski



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Family Issues, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Parent-Child Relationship, Parentlock, Sebastian Moran and Jim Moriarty are Parents, Tamil Moran, Trans Character, Transgender, bad brains, moran family values, seb moran: minder of highly sensitive people, the kids are alright
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-30
Updated: 2016-05-30
Packaged: 2018-07-11 06:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7033219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was written off a pair of prompts: jackmarlowe's <em>trans Tommy</em> and atrickstertype's <em>"No,” Siobhan says, losing patience. “Stop it. You haven’t met my ma.”</em></p><p>As per usual, it got slightly out of hand. </p><p>This is an AU of the usual parentlock/Siobhan Moran universe, and shouldn't be treated as canon for that series. But it fits reasonably well!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tell Me Ma

**Author's Note:**

  * For [atrickstertype](https://archiveofourown.org/users/atrickstertype/gifts), [jackmarlowe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/gifts).



The middle O’Doyle girl—there are seven O’Doyles, and all of them are girls—hears about the Morans long before their daughter stops some fifteen feet away from their front stoop, little and intense and dark—but they’re not town folk, the O’Doyles, and that sets them apart from town gossip, and the only Moran the middle O’Doyle girl has met so far is Siobhan, just now, in the lane. All she knows, really, is that they took the old Conner house. She doesn’t even know their names. She only knows the daughter’s because it’s getting impossible, not to know who Siobhan Moran is, even a full grade up.

“Hello,” says the middle O’Doyle girl, finally. Siobhan Moran is too thin to be beautiful, but she’s shy of her anyway, shy or scared, with her scuffed worn sneakers and jeans with holes in the knees. There isn’t an answer, exactly, but those dark eyes lay against the O’Doyle girl with such force that her blink is like a greeting. She blinks back, says without thinking in her country-Irish voice, “You’re Siobhán.”

“See-oh-bahn.” The response is instantaneous, and very fierce, and very soft. The middle O’Doyle ducks her head, and says, with a tiny lilt of a question, “Siobhan.”

“Yes.” She’s so tiny, delicate chin firmly set and hands at her sides. “You’re the dead-center one.”

It takes a minute to make sense, and then the middle O’Doyle girl nods, tucks her fingers into the crook of her folded-up knees. Siobhan tilts her head, looks away and then back. She seems to have trouble holding eye contact, and with gentling that eye contact, when she does hold it. It reminds the O’Doyle girl of watching a hawk hunched over a rabbit, out in the back field last fall.

“What’s your name?”

“Niamh.”

Siobhan’s forehead creases, and something happens to her pupils or the skin around her eyes, and she shakes her head, sharp. “No. I don’t like that. What else?”

The rejection should sting and yes, _yes_ , it feels to the middle O’Doyle girl like falling, like reeling out into the open air, but the anxiety in Siobhan’s neck and shoulders is real, and so is the flash of white in the corners of her gaze like a nervous horse. And the O’Doyle girl does not like her name. This is a true thing, and nothing at all to do with Siobhan Moran.

Maybe a little, with Siobhan Moran.

The O’Doyle girl has six sisters, three and three on either side, hair an uneven varying arc of red-gold to red-brown with herself the palest, nearly blond, all their eyes but hers brown or hazel like her ma and father, and she can hear the oldest, the echo-sigh of _Don’t be such a tomboy, Niamh_ , even when all of them have to wear boots and old clothes to feed the pigs. Even when her jeans are that oldest sister’s, passed down.

 _Don’t be_ , and it echoes again, rough, and the O’Doyle girl has trouble breathing around it, around the pressure of it and Siobhan Moran’s intensity.

_Such a tomboy, Niamh._

“Tom,” she says, in a kind of agony.

“Tommy,” says Siobhan. “Alright. Come on, then.” And she turns, on one heel, as if she doesn’t believe in a world where the middle O’Doyle girl will not get up and follow her.

So Tommy does.

 

Mr. Moran is a tall brown man with a ragged scar across one cheekbone and more peeking from the collar of his shirt, his eyes as pale a blue as Tommy’s, and when Siobhan brings her around a week later he introduces himself, very seriously, like he’s talking to an adult, as Sebastian. But he smiles while he does it. Tommy, who is already learning what Siobhan’s personal space requirements are like, is surprised when she steps away from her to lean against his hip. It looks like a learned motion, and so does the careful way Mr. Moran smooths her hair, as dark as his might be without the sun having bleached it brown, but straighter.

“Alright, Bhan?” he says; his accent is unfamiliar but Tommy likes it almost immediately.

“Yes,” Siobhan says, and pulls away from him, stepping back towards Tommy until they are a seething, electric inch apart. “Where’s—?” she cuts off, then jerks her chin towards a desk in the corner of the living room.

The expression on Sebastian’s face as he looks at the girl standing next to his daughter is impossible to parse, and Tom licks her lips, anxious that she’s not meeting some kind of qualification, that she’ll be sent home, not allowed back, kept from Siobhan, who she has known, now, for less than a week. Mr. Moran’s eyes change, and then he winks, leaving Tommy gaping.

“Off on business, pet. You can introduce him to your mum later.”

Tommy opens her mouth, then shuts it, and looks to Siobhan, waiting for her to correct him, like her parents have been doing since Tommy coaxed or bribed Fiona into cutting her hair. Siobhan catches the look, catches and for an awful moment holds it; then she turns away, restless, without another word. In another minute Tommy hears water running in the kitchen, the noise of of a kettle set on the stove, the _click-click-whoosh_ of the gas lighting beneath it.

Mr. Moran sighs, and says, “Go on and keep her company, Tommy, and ask her to make me a cuppa, hey? And make sure you get one as well.” There’s a brief silence where man and girl look at each other. “She’s a wild thing and her mum is too, lad, and if she worries you, you come and find me _right away_ , understand?” His mouth quirks up then, a little crooked because of a scar that doesn’t show unless he smiles. “But she’s taken a shine to you, like J—like Jamie did to me.”

And Sebastian ruffles her hair, casual, masculine, and says, “Run along, Tommy,” and she’s in the kitchen with Siobhan, reeling and unsoothed, unmoored from the little house and the field around it, until Siobhan Moran hisses out her rage and makes the jerky motion that suggests she’s about to break a cup; and Tommy takes it out of her hands, and the world makes sense again.

 

They start walking to school together, when it starts back up in the late summer; and Tommy finds she can’t even muster up surprise when Siobhan is in her class, jumped a full grade up, so that even with two years between them—Tommy is not exactly slow, but you miss out, farming—they’re both freshly into secondary school. Siobhan says nothing about it. _Nobody_ says anything about it.

Nobody says anything about how Niamh O'Doyle is called Tommy now, either.

It’s a kind of magic, Tommy thinks, playing with a pencil as Siobhan huddles herself into twists and hunches, intent on the math—which looks different than the math on Tommy’s paper, because the maths teacher is no fool and has no problem skipping her ahead, muttering something about Matildas under his breath—in front of her, entirely silent. Maths is the only class she’s manageable in. The rest are like pulling teeth, and Tom doesn’t know what to _do,_ even though all the teachers are looking at her like she should, so in the third week of term, she shuffles awkwardly in front of Sebastian while Siobhan is examining a textbook—Siobhan’s mother is still not home, which seems strange but which neither Moran appears to be worried about—and asks him questions, and listens to the answers. He doesn’t have all the answers either, but he has more than Tommy.

And the next day when Siobhan rolls her head on her neck and makes a noise like a groan, Tommy takes a deep breath, puts up her hand, and asks for a hall pass. The teacher looks at Siobhan. Looks at Tommy. Looks, very briefly, at the ceiling—then writes out two and hands both of them to Tom, which means that thirty seconds later in the hallway Tommy is gripping both of Siobhan’s wrists, thumbs pressing against the tendons that stand out like iron bars.

“Siobhan,” she says, and then in Irish, which she is reasonably sure Siobhan understands, “Look at me. Just me. Okay?”

There’s a pause, and she twists like a fish on a hook but Tommy holds on, waits her out, thinks of Sebastian saying _Give her a focus_ ; and then Siobhan looks at her, a flash of dark eyes. Tom breathes out. Squeezes and lets go.

“Ready?” she says, breathless.

And when Siobhan nods they go back in.  

 

It’s well into fall—almost winter—when Siobhan is late getting her for the first time. Tommy sits on the front stoop until the last possible minute and then past it, anxious and cold, Fiona’s last-winter coat wrapped around a body that has grown two inches in the last two months. The air smells like snow already. Maybe Siobhan is sick. Maybe she’s just sick of Tommy, and her dad has already driven her into town, and yesterday was the last Tom will ever see of her outside a classroom, scowling and snarling and kicking frozen lumps of mud.

“Stop looking like I killed your pet pig,” Siobhan says when she comes around the corner five minutes later, terse but not angry. Tommy jerks to attention. Something about her looks different, though not in any way she can put a finger on; except that Siobhan’s shoulder brushes her upper arm lightly as they walk, in a way that’s almost friendly. Or if not friendly, then companionable.

“You were late,” Tommy says.

“Couldn’t help it.” A bump this time, not a brush. “My ma came home this morning. Early.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” Siobhan says, and Tommy has a limited understanding of irony but she hears it in Siobhan’s Northern-Irish voice. “ _Oh_.”

“Can I meet—”

“No.“ There’s no negotiating with a no like that, accompanied by Siobhan’s elbow—she’s gained muscle in the past half year, but she’s still too thin for Tommy’s comfort—hard against Tommy’s ribs. “It’s not a good time. Later.” And then her hand finds Tommy’s hand and her fingers curl around Tommy’s fingers, impossible and brief, terrifyingly intimate, and she adds, “Promise.”

Tommy’s mouth opens and shuts and then her body betrays her and she says, miserable but driven by something she doesn’t understand, “I have to tell you something.”

“Tell,” Siobhan says, interested as she ever gets in Tommy even if her eyes look far away.

“I’m—you let your dad think I was a boy, and I didn’t—I haven’t.” Tommy presses her tongue against her teeth. They don’t talk, the two of them, not like this. “I’m not like my sisters, and I didn’t... I didn’t like being Niamh even without you—” a tiny dismissive noise from Siobhan and Tom says, despairing, “I _didn’t_ , Siobhan, I hated it, I hate being a sister, I want—” her breath catches wounded in her chest “—I want to be their brother. I think I am their brother. I’m not... this isn’t a good body for me anymore except for being tall, I don’t want everyone looking at me and thinking I’m something I’m not—”

“I don’t need you to explain it to me,” Siobhan says, flat, and there’s a hint of exasperation, anger, the sense of being pushed too far, and it terrifies Tom because it’s so important that she gets all the way through, that she says it. “I understand, Tommy, be _quiet_.”

“You don’t understand, how can you understand?” Tommy stops dead in the middle of the road and for the first time she turns on Siobhan, staring at her until she looks up and dark eyes meet blue ones. “I’m not a girl, Siobhan! I haven’t told anyone else but you’re not even listening or you don’t even _care_ , which, of course you don’t—”

“I do.”

“You don’t! How could you, you won’t even let me—”

“ _Stop_ ,” says Siobhan, losing patience, rocking up on her toes and back in a way that makes Tommy catch her breath, ragged. “Stop it. You haven’t met my ma.”

It seems like a non-sequitur but Tom knows her too well. Siobhan’s eyes are locked on to hers, even though it’s clearly making her writhe with discomfort, pulse beating visibly in her throat; her body is a bowstring.

“Not tonight,” Siobhan says into the humming air between them. “It can’t be tonight. Or tomorrow. Dad’s running me to school and home starting tonight and anyway it’s not safe yet.” She chews on a thumbnail, gaze still boring into Tommy’s. She wonders why Siobhan is walking to school this morning, not quite able to believe it might have something to do with her. “Come home with me this weekend.”

It’s not a question. Most things aren’t, with Siobhan; most things edge, like this is edging, into demand, and Tommy sags with relief at the familiarity of it.

“Okay.”

Siobhan makes a back-of-throat noise and turns away, jerkily, so that her eye contact is flash and flicker again, and Tommy, feeling giddy and almost ill, lets her go. Starts walking again, and after a few seconds Siobhan follows. The whole situation is horribly adult—they are thirteen and eleven, Tommy thinks, they are not _ready_ for this and yet here it is, happening—with this secret stretched between them, another thing to tie them together. Tom already feels bound to her, inextricable, inevitable, a tether stretched tight; but suddenly the pull is two-sided, like Siobhan had wrapped the rope around her wrist in two sturdy, tightening loops.

The road is all blacktop and frozen gravel but Tommy is on fire inside her chest.

_Stop it. You haven’t met my ma._

 

The weekend doesn’t come for days. In school Siobhan is focused inward, curled around herself; she looks at Tommy in darts and never for long. Whatever was different about her on the road is still different but more so, and Tom is braced, every inch of her, to drag them both out into the hallway but it never needs doing, and on Friday Sebastian comes with the car for both of them. He looks surprised to see her standing next to Siobhan, but when his daughter climbs into the front seat and Tommy into the back, Mr. Moran does not demand an explanation. Instead he pulls out, the speed of the car making the doors slam shut before Tom is fairly settled, and drives most of the way in silence.

“Pet,” he says once they’re close, “You know your mum’s still—”

“It can’t wait, dad.” Her voice is totally unlike the voice Tommy would use to talk to her parents. “I know what I’m doing.”

He actually turns his head away from the road to look at her, and the look isn’t anything like Tommy has seen an adult use on a child ever before, worried and level and open—not exactly like they’re equals, but not at all like father and daughter. Siobhan makes a rough little noise in the back of her throat and meets his gaze easily; more easily than she has ever met Tommy’s, and Tommy is just the _slightest_ flash jealous. She swallows it, hard. Sebastian is Siobhan’s father. Of course it will be easier.

Siobhan’s eyes flick to hers.

So do Sebastian’s.

“Alright, Bhan,” he says, and swings the car up the drive. There’s no second vehicle, nothing to suggest another adult is living there now, but Mr. Moran is entirely, intensely focused on the house in front of them and Tommy—who has her hands tucked under her thighs to keep them from fretting at each other and the seat—is afraid. Siobhan too is almost canted towards the the front door, in the instant between the car stopping and her undoing the seatbelt and slipping out. If Tommy has to walk into the little cottage without her she won’t be able to bear it so she follows before she can think too hard about it.

For the second time that week Siobhan’s fingers curl around Tom’s, cool and small, there and gone; and then they are at the door with Siobhan pulling it open and saying with that Northern-Irish lilt that Tommy hadn’t heard so clearly before three days ago, “Mum?”

A long silence, and then: “Kitchen.”

It’s not the kind of voice Tommy had expected; Siobhan’s is almost hoarse, most of the time, and low for a girl; except when she laughs, just a shade too high for comfort. Her mum sounds like Dublin, like public school, but even the single-word answer has a singsong in it that sounds so like Siobhan in a mood that it jerks the breath right out of Tommy’s chest and suddenly she wants, desperately, to know both of Siobhan’s parents. Siobhan wears Sebastian the same way she wears his sweaters on cold days, the sleeves pushed up and the fit all wrong. She must wear her mum too. Somehow. Tommy wants to _know,_ and she steps forward without thinking.

The man in the kitchen looks just like Siobhan. When he sees Tommy, he laughs, and he laughs just like his daughter, and Tom feels like she can’t breathe; and then Siobhan says, “Stop it, mum.” And then, as she comes up behind and their shoulders brush together, “This is—”

“O’Doyle,” says the small dark man to the small dark girl. “Am I right? I _am_ , aren’t I, it’s not like it’s hard to tell, I’ve seen the parents already, not that they know me from Adam I’m sure.” He looks at Tommy and Tommy does not want to be looking back at him, but she’s learned calm from Sebastian somehow, and steadiness, and she holds her position. “Your timing’s very strange, Siobhan, pet.”

“That’s what I said.” Sebastian closes the front door softly and comes to stand close to Siobhan’s ma, leaning to kiss him on the temple. “Hello, Jim.”

Tommy expects the man—expects Jim—to move away from the contact the same way Siobhan would; instead he makes a pleased little noise and hooks his fingers into Sebastian’s belt. This time the flash of jealousy is all over Tom’s face, she knows it is, and she doesn’t understand it but she has the horrible, creeping feeling that at least one other person in the room does. Jim is still looking at her. It’s agonizing, and Tommy’s fingers are clenched into fists at her side but she _will not be the one to look away._

Is this what it’s like, to be Siobhan?

“Stop it,” Siobhan says again into the breathless space of the kitchen, firm and very adult. “He’s mine.”

It goes very quiet. Jim’s gaze gets, if possible, even sharper, and his eyebrows go up.

_There are seven O’Doyles and all of them are girls._

She waits for it to turn. Waits for those appalling eyes to strip off the boy she’s wearing—trying to wear—and show them all what’s going on. Show Sebastian. Sebastian, who has never met her parents or her sisters and doesn’t appear to know anything about them and who calls her _the boy_ to Siobhan when he thinks Tom is out of earshot. No, she thinks. Please, no. Not yet.

“Is he?” says Jim, entirely pleasant, and then— _go raibh maith Críost_ —he looks away from Tommy.

“Yes.” Siobhan tilts her head to one side. Tommy just breathes, not quite believing it will be this simple. Then she says something that makes no sense at all, but will keep the adult Tom up at night sometimes, listening to her breathing in the dark: “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Darling girl,” Jim drawls, and Tommy watches him as he looks at her, the shadow of stubble on his cheeks, the impeccable cut of his suit. He looks almost hungry—she sneaks a glance at Siobhan. They both do. Like both of them have something the other needs.

Tommy finds herself wondering, for no good reason, how long Siobhan has known her parents.

“Aren’t you clever,” says Jim.

Sebastian clears his throat, then. “Siobhan,” he murmurs, “names all round, hey? Properly this time.”

It takes a few seconds for her to hear him, or maybe it takes a few seconds for her to pull her focus away from Jim, but then Siobhan makes a little noise and says, “Mum, this is Tommy. Tommy, this is my mum. Jim.” She points her chin at the small dark man and Tom, baffled and still afraid, offers her hand to shake.

Jim takes it. Sebastian says, quietly, “His Christian name is James, since he’s not like to tell you—Jamie when we’re out, Jim when we’re at home.” A beat, then he says something even more softly in a liquid language Tom doesn’t recognize; and Jim lets Tommy go.

“Pleasure’s mine, I’m sure,” Jim murmurs. His smile flashes, and Tom is both horrified and reassured, seeing Siobhan’s expression on his face; but no, it must be Jim’s expression on hers. Siobhan looks between all three of them, and makes a small noise in the back of her throat which Tommy recognizes as pleasure. Tommy just stands there, an arm’s length from Siobhan, in the bright little kitchen with the scent of woodsmoke and black tea just starting to overbrew, and the winter sun coming in all pale through the window. She doesn’t understand what’s happening here. Doesn’t understand why Sebastian is watching his—his husband? his spouse?—with such intensity. Like there’s danger brewing. Like Tommy has introduced something that can’t be predicted, a match struck too close to a powderkeg, so that even if she stands as quiet as she can—and she _is_ standing entirely quiet, the next best thing to frozen—everything will still go up in flames.

Jim darts sideways and Tommy doesn’t, quite, squeak. He doesn’t move like a human moves. Mr. Moran takes a casual step and all the dynamics in the room shift, abruptly; Sebastian is suddenly in between Jim and the two of them, one hand going out without looking to catch Siobhan against her chest when she tries to dart as well.

_—and anyway it’s not safe yet—_

Tommy’s breath jerks in her throat like the start of a sob and her fingers clench into fists; and then Siobhan actually _snarls._ She pulls away from Sebastian and crowds roughly into Tommy’s space, shoulder thumping against hers, possessive.

“It’s alright,” she says, low, almost a hiss. “He’s my mum. He won’t hurt you. Swear.” And then, louder, “Mum, _swear,_ he’s mine and that means he’s ours and that means safe.” She lifts her small chin again and there’s a quiver to her Tommy doesn’t like, the kind that at school would make her put up a hand for a hall pass to get her outside. “I need him to be _safe_.”

“Bhan—”

“I’m talking to my mother.” Siobhan is actually trembling with some sort of huge and consuming emotion; Tommy, hesitant here in front of her parents but determined to be that safety, reaches out to grip her forearm. She yanks back but not hard, just a reaction, and Tom holds on. “ _Mum_.”

“Yes,” Jim says, and waves a hand, loose-wristed. “Yes of course. Be _easy_ , pet, I’m not doubting your choices.”

“You were gone a long time,” says Siobhan, twisting her own wrist in Tommy’s hand, her tone somewhere between accusatory and forlorn. “It was hard.”

The only place Tom can think to look for answers is at Sebastian so she does; and he seems to feel the strength of her eyes on him because he glances down at her, shakes his head the littlest bit, mouths _Later_. Neither Siobhan nor Jim appears to notice, they’re that focused on each other, the former tense, the latter with his head a little on one side.

“You did just fine,” Jim says. “With your dad and with Tommy.” A little pause. “And I’m home, now.”

Siobhan nods, a jagged motion, and jerks her arm again. This time Tommy lets her go. Her palm prickles where it’s been in contact with Siobhan’s skin, and she rubs both hands against her jeans in as inconspicuous a way as possible. Sebastian reaches out, across the space between himself and the small dark man Siobhan calls mum, and rests his fingers against the curve of Jim’s jaw.

“C’mon, boss,” he says. “Let’s give the kids an hour to do their homework before dinner.”

“We don’t have—”

“And I’ll run Tommy home after it.“ Sebastian talks right over his daughter, level and even, his pale eyes on Jim’s face; she hisses, turns away, stalks down the hallway towards her room. Which leaves Tommy in with the adults. Which is almost unbearable, and she bolts after Siobhan, heart tight in her chest with fear and a kind of complicated pride, that she’s being allowed to stay so long in a house that also contains whatever Jim is.

The last thing she hears, before their voices drop into the low murmur of parents keeping information from their children, is Jim saying in a sing-song lilt, “You might have _mentioned_ , tiger,” and Sebastian’s answering, “Would’ve had to have known how to reach you, wouldn’t I’ve?” which makes, of course, no sense at all.

 

It’s a week later before she sees Jim for more than a flash in passing; Tommy is reasonably sure that Sebastian is doing his best to minimize contact and she appreciates it, desperately. Siobhan is already worse than ever, wild and rough-handed, and she kills a bird with a snare the afternoon Tommy comes face to face again with Jim. It had died quickly—that much was plain—but Tommy had stared down at it in consternation where it lay on the kitchen table, and then up at Sebastian as he can into the room; and Mr. Moran’s face did not change but something in his eyes shut, like a door.

And now Tommy is on the back steps, unsure of what to do, halfway down and halfway up. This is miles beyond what she feels equipped to handle, but what isn’t, and the look on Siobhan’s face when her father had told Tommy, gently, to go home—

“Incidentally,” Jim says, and Tommy’s heart leaps out of her chest like a frog, “I’m not.”

It takes a while for her to get over the shock but Tommy’s best defense—Tommy’s only defense—is in politeness, with Jim so near. And where had he _come_ from? He’s standing on the lawn some feet away, sleeves rolled up and hands in his pockets.

“Not what?”

“A woman.” Jim’s voice rolls deep on the first syllable of _woman_ , dropping down the octave like Siobhan’s sometimes does. And then he goes on, and when he does Tommy needs, badly, to sit down. “Not now, and not previously—and not the way you would mean, if you were to say _either_ of those things.”

He looks quietly at Tommy. Tommy, helpless, stares back.

“Don’t worry,” Jim says in that appalling low-high voice, “there’s no reason Sebastian needs to know, unless you have some sort of yen on to tell him. You’re Siobhan’s boy, which makes you her business and none of ours.”

“Then why—” Tommy stops, swallows hard, and tries again. “When I told Siobhan that I wasn’t, that I’m not—” an agonizing pause as she gropes for what she wants to say. “That I’m—”

“The word you’re looking for is transgender.“

“That,” she says, horrified and relieved that there _is_ a word for it. “Yes. She wouldn’t let me finish and when I tried she just, she just said  _You haven’t met my ma,_ and I thought…”

“She’s not entirely off the scent.” Jim rocks on the balls of his feet, forward and back, considering. “A girl needs a feminine influence,” he says, and Tommy blinks. “I’m sure you’ll agree Sebastian isn’t entirely up to the task. I, on the other hand.” His grin is a terrible thing, and he waves a hand, the motion a woman’s motion—and it’s not in play or derision, but as natural as breathing, and it looks right on him—and looks Tommy right in the eye. “Nothing binary about us. You’ll see soon enough, with Siobhan.”

 _Us,_ and somehow Tommy does not think Jim means the two of them, standing here in the garden in the middle of the day.

“Run along home, Thomas O’Doyle,” says Jim, and Tommy turns and flees.

  



End file.
